Ben Ling, a longtime Silicon Valley angel investor and Internet exec, has joined Khosla Ventures as a new member of the investment staff.

Ling is the second hire of high-profile operating execs by Khosla. Former Square, Slide and PayPal exec Keith Rabois — who is a close friend of Ling’s — joined the firm in February.

In an interview today, Ling said he has been contemplating his next move, and the idea of becoming a VC after years of operations was appealing.

“I thought a lot about the ability to have impact across a broad set of companies, and was attracted to Khosla’s model of venture assistance,” said Ling, who added that he will focus a lot on the mobile ecosystem. “When I was younger, I thought it would be fascinating to be an investor, and here I can help a lot of companies grow and scale.”

Ling is a former Google and Facebook product exec, as well as an active investor in 80 startups, including such high-profile ones as Fab.com, Square and Quora. He was most recently COO at Badoo, but left the company last fall.

At Google, he worked on search, YouTube and local products, and was closely linked with former Googler Marissa Mayer, whom he followed internally when her responsibilities shifted there. Many thought he might next pop up at Yahoo, where she is now CEO.

Not so, but also not a surprise; Mayer provided Khosla with a lovely statement about Ling: “Ben is an amazing entrepreneurial leader and has a great eye as an investor for both talent and ideas. I’m excited to see him join Khosla Ventures to find and foster the next set of entrepreneurs who will define the technology world.”

The hypothetical wormhole to this absurdly ambitious goal? The wish list.

Wish co-founders Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang

The startup is called ContextLogic, and it’s got some of tech’s most smartypants investors behind it, as well as 10 million people already signed up for its wish-list service, called Wish.com.

“We want to be Google AdWords for the retailer,” explained co-founder and CEO Peter Szulczewski, an engineer who previously worked on ad algorithms and search at Google for five years.

Users sign up for Wish to make wish lists. They save, tag and recommend products to each other (and, by default, it’s social-spammy, with automatic posts to your Facebook profile and rewards for inviting friends). Then the company matches participating merchants with potential customers, and sends out discounts for specific products.

So, basically, it’s like personalized coupons.

The target retailer for Wish is an Amazon Marketplace merchant who wants to get more distribution without paying Amazon a significant portion of each transaction. To that end, Wish plans to launch self-serve tools for retailers next month, Szulczewski said. Eventually, it wants to get more closely involved with transactions by offering checkout tools.

The 20-person, San Francisco-based ContextLogic has raised $8 million in funding, led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s Formation 8, with former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Factual’s Gil Elbaz, Sling co-founder Blake Krikorian, Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter, Steve Chen of YouTube and Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures and others participating.

Because the Wish experience is all about tastemaking and discovery, “We’re creating hundreds of Fab.coms in different verticals,” said co-founder Danny Zhang, who previously worked on the Overture team at Yahoo.

Wish users have saved 100 million products, and recommend 100,000 of them per day, according to internal data.

There are many other wish-list products out there; for instance, Amazon and Pinterest. Zhang and Szulczewski say Wish’s advantage is that the wish list is pretty, it’s tightly and smartly integrated with an advertising platform and, most of all, it’s constantly being optimized.

Plus, Wish is especially sticky on mobile. Via iPhone, Android and iPad apps, engagement and sales are double what they are on the Web, the company said.

While I have already spelled out a number of reasons why he might be let go, here’s one reason why he should stay: On Black Friday, Groupon said it saw almost twice the purchase rate of its previous busiest day on record.

Call it an early present for Mason, who also learned yesterday that he is keeping his job as CEO — at least, for now.

This year, Groupon is putting an especially heavy emphasis on holiday gifts, after launching physical goods on the site more than a year ago. While coupons for restaurants and spas also sell well this time of year, physical gifts are more traditionally considered presents.

Yesterday, Groupon said its physical products division, Groupon Goods, celebrated its biggest four-day weekend since the program’s inception. Put another way, over the seven days after Thanksgiving in North America, Groupon generated double the gross billings from last year, with essentially all of the growth attributable to Groupon Goods, according to Yipit, a third-party data provider.

Top sellers included customizable photo books, iPhone cases, Topaz earrings and flying toy helicopters, which sold 43,000, 40,000, 42,000 and 11,000 units, respectively.

While an increase in sales is always a good thing, Groupon has received some static about its entrance into selling physical goods, which have thinner margins than local deals. It also means entering an extremely competitive landscape with well-established players, like Walmart and Amazon, although clearly it has demonstrated it can sell thousands of items fairly easily.

At least two promotions helped Groupon see a huge spike in the sale of Goods over the weekend. Yipit said that following Thanksgiving, the homepage redirected visitors to Groupon.com/goods (although it’s back to directing people to their local markets). Additionally, Groupon rolled out Grouponicus, the company’s third annual wintertime promotion, which offers customers gift ideas. For the first time this year, it offered a holiday toy catalog and free shipping and returns.

Groupon’s close competitor LivingSocial, which is facing its own turmoil, also saw a lift this year during the Thanksgiving week, although not as much since it’s still in the early days of building out its products division. In North America, for the week following Thanksgiving, Yipit said LivingSocial revenues jumped 30 percent. In particular, Yipit said sales from products were up roughly 5 percent, with a bump over the past few days coming from a partnership with Fab.com. (Separately, Fab said today it averaged $933,500 in daily sales for a week straight).

Still, one thing on Mason’s wish list that he has not received is a higher stock price. While shares were trading higher recently on news that he might be replaced, shares are now down 8.8 percent, or 40 cents, to trade at $4.14 a share.

Venture capitalists often tell entrepreneurs that, beyond investing, a VC can provide a lot of value by giving advice or making valuable introductions.

Here’s one I hadn’t seen before: VCs promoting their portfolio companies to friends, families and associates as places to do their holiday shopping.

First Round Capital is launching a special site today, where more than two dozen of their investments are listing holiday deals for Cyber Monday. Companies participating include One Kings Lane, Kiwi Crate, Birchbox, Dog Vacay, Warby Parker, Fab.com, Threadflip and Hotel Tonight. The offers range from free shipping to $50 or 15 percent off, depending on the kind of products and services for sale.

First Round Capital is heavily invested in e-commerce, so it knows all too well what the holidays can mean to a young company trying to grow its revenue.

This year is promising to be a monster online shopping event, with record-setting days already taking place. The day after Thanksgiving, called Black Friday, turned into an online feeding frenzy, with consumers spending $1.04 billion, an increase of 26 percent over last year. Amazon saw the most action, as was expected, followed by Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple.

If First Round Capital’s companies can capture just a slice of that discretionary spending, it could mean a couple of good months to top off the year (which leads to higher valuations and happy investors). First Round Partner Josh Kopelman wrote a brief blog post directing people to visit the site, adding that the companies “will be shipping hundreds of thousands of products this holiday season to customers all over the world.” You can bet we’ll see other partners tweeting it, Facebooking it and sending it out via email, as well (not to mention tipping off the media).

Slightly ahead of the holidays, a handful of venture-backed companies have announced TV advertising campaigns, including One Kings Lane, Fab.com, OpenSky, Gilt Groupe and Wayfair.

All of the companies are hoping to see a lift in sales and increased brand awareness, but the immediate beneficiaries of this trend will clearly be TV networks that have strong female demographics, like Bravo, the Food Network, HGTV, E! Entertainment, Oxygen, Lifetime and TLC.

The advertising campaigns could cost anywhere from tens of thousands to millions, depending on the ads and how often they are going to run, but many of the companies are being conservative and labeling the launches as experiments.

The options range wildly between Wayfair’s 30-second spot, which was developed in-house for $30,000, and One Kings Lane’s two 30-second spots created by the premiere ad agency Wieden+Kennedy New York. Meanwhile, OpenSky is characterizing its commercial as a “modest test,” and Gilt Groupe said it hired Ocean Media, the agency behind ad campaigns for Priceline.com, Overstock.com and Angie’s List. Fab.com planned to run its ad in six U.S. markets for three weeks and then take it national if it was satisfied with results.

What’s interesting is that the campaigns are trying to drive traffic to the companies’ mobile sites and applications, capturing the behavior of viewers who sit on the sofa and watch TV with their phone or tablet in hand. That trend has been coined “couch commerce.”

For example, in Gilt Groupe’s minute-long spot called “High Noon,” one cowgirl is able to order a sparkling pair of pumps in a desert shootout because she uses the app to pull the trigger faster.

Wayfair said it’s also hoping to see a significant increase in mobile traffic. After launching its first ad campaign in September, Wayfair saw a traffic lift in the five minutes following the commercial. It said 35 percent of traffic was coming from mobile phones and tablets versus 13 percent normally. The home decor site’s Black Friday commercial (which is not too shabby, considering the budget), started running in late October.

The biggest indicator of whether these commercials actually pay off will be if they are still around in any significant way in the New Year, or if they will be short-lived tests. The one drawback for any of these boutique shopping sites is Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce during the holidays. As I wrote earlier today, 53 percent of U.S. consumers are planning to begin their Christmas shopping at the mega retailer.

But potentially, if the advertisements are creative and just darn cute enough, they could help change that behavior.

Below are the Wayfair and One Kings Lane commercials (others are linked above):

In a recent survey, more than half of U.S. consumers – 53 percent — said they would begin their shopping with Amazon.

In the proprietary survey conducted by Baird Equity Research, analyst Colin Sebastian said Google will be the second-most-popular initial destination (36 percent); eBay is the third (7 percent); and then it tapers off drastically from there, with Walmart.com in fourth place (2 percent).

Beyond tradition, there’s a good reason why consumers are drawn to the classics at this time of the year. Essentially, these sites are the shopping malls of the Internet, where just about anything can be found by plugging the name of a sought-after product — like the new Wii U or the Nexus 7 tablet — into a search box, and getting immediate results.

It’s worth noting that the “other” category in the survey totals 1 percent, which is fairly significant, since spending will hit $1 billion on big shopping days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday (the Friday and Monday after Thanksgiving). You can assume that a big portion of that will go toward nontraditional or boutique retailers, which aren’t focusing on search, but rather on curating a small inventory of products for people who may be having a hard time deciding what to buy. Some sites that do a really good job of this include the Daily Grommet, Fab.com, Groupon and OpenSky.

But, given that the bulk of the shopping starts with Amazon, Google and eBay, here’s a look at what each one brings to the dining-room table:

1. Amazon: The retailer benefits from the act of “showrooming.” Roughly 30 percent of smartphone users in the survey said they always or frequently compare prices of products in retail stores using a mobile device, and 75 percent are comparing prices in stores. Data from comScore suggests that mobile shoppers tend to favor apps for Amazon and eBay versus apps from particular retailers. The takeaway is that even if some people might shop in person, they could end up buying online.
2. Google Shopping: This year, Google has changed the way it accepts product feeds from retailers. Before, it was free, but now it is a paid experience. While retailers will have to budget for this change, they will be getting a lot for their money, including the ability to post large images — some in 3-D — that appear on the results page. Customers can easily sort across many sites (eBay, Wayfair, Newegg, etc.), looking for the retailer that has the best prices, free shipping and other features, like style, size or color. The results will not include Amazon’s products, however, as the company has declined to pay to play.
3. eBay: Like Amazon, it’s mobile, mobile, mobile for both eBay and its PayPal subsidiary. For all the people who don’t want to get off the couch and fight the crowds at the mall, the company is listing a variety of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals exclusively on its mobile applications. Those deals will not be found if consumers visit eBay online.
4. Walmart.com: This holiday, the mega-offline-retailer wants to be more accessible online. It has started offering customers in four markets the chance to buy and receive items on the same day, for $10. It has launched “Walmart To Go” in Northern Virginia, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, and the San Jose-San Francisco area is coming in November. No minimum orders are required. EBay has done the same thing in San Francisco, and Sebastian found in his survey that 70 percent of consumers would be willing to pay $5 to $10 for the service.

In the physical retail world, it’s the equivalent of putting up Christmas displays and piping in carols over the sound system before Thanksgiving, maybe even before Halloween.

This year, e-tailers are jumping the gun in an effort to get a bigger share of your wallet by announcing sales as much as a week before such traditionally heavy online shopping days as Black Friday and Cyber Monday (the Friday and Monday following Thanksgiving, respectively).

Two of the biggest retailers in the U.S. are exemplifying this trend with rival releases this morning:

Walmart said today that it is kicking off Cyber Week this year on Saturday, Nov. 24, and lasting through Sunday, Dec. 2. Specials will be available online and refreshed daily, with customers enjoying free shipping on more than 100,000 items. Meanwhile, Amazon said its Black Friday deals are starting today and running through Saturday. “We’re offering customers our widest selection of Black Friday Lightning Deals ever and we’re bringing doorbuster deals to shoppers earlier this year,” said Ben Hartman, Amazon’s VP of consumer electronics.

There are signs that consumers are responding to the early offers:

• PayPal, which claims to process nearly one-fifth of global e-commerce, said today that the official U.S. shopping season started as early as Sept. 30.
• Fab.com said today that sales from its 2012 holiday shopping are up 400 percent versus its holiday business this time a year ago.
• Chase Holiday Pulse data, which tracks data from 50 large e-commerce retailers, is finding that year-over-year sales volume is up 12.3 percent over 2011. Some days, like Nov. 11, were up more than 50 percent.

But many of the busiest days are yet to come. UPS is preparing for Thursday, Dec. 20, when the logistics company estimates it will deliver 28 million packages around the world, compared to its average day of 15.8 million packages. This holiday is expected to be a record-breaking year for UPS, which is forecasting that it will deliver 527 million packages between Thanksgiving and Christmas, surpassing last year’s total of 480 million.

Source: Fab.com. Employees at Fab.com work from the offices of Zelkova Ventures, one of Fab’s earliest investors.

But last week, superstorm Sandy proved that even virtual organizations have their kryptonite.

As the power went out in parts of New York and New Jersey, e-commerce sites dealt with the realities of the physical world as warehouses came to a screeching halt and trucks could not get through flooded streets to make deliveries.

To add to the burden, the lack of electricity in both offices and employees’ homes made getting online to conduct business even more difficult.

Niraj Shah, the CEO and co-founder of Wayfair, said this morning that the Boston-based home decor site witnessed the effects second-hand. At the peak of the storm, 1,300 of its 4,000 suppliers were offline, he said, and today, 63 of its suppliers are still cleaning up after the floods. Shah said on Friday, one of its suppliers filled one particularly urgent order by flashlight, but in other cases, items were removed from its site if they knew it would take too long to get to customers’ homes.

“We are always monitoring the fill rate and lead time,” he said. “We had a couple of suppliers running on generators or flashlights to keep some volume moving.”

Other e-commerce sites based in the Northeast, including Fab.com, OpenSky, Gilt Groupe and Diapers.com, saw the impact from the storm first-hand.

Fab.com, which sells quirky home decor and apparel online, lost power at its headquarters in the West Village and at two of its warehouses in New Jersey.

Source: Lot18 Lot18 employees displaced by Superstorm Sandy find alternate places to work.

During the chaos, co-founder and CEO Jason Goldberg wrote about the challenges on the company’s blog. “About 1/3 of our employees lost power at home. Some of our team members suffered damages to their homes and property. Our offices and our warehouses lost power. But, thankfully everyone in the Fab Family is safe,” he wrote.

Last week, Goldberg said employees found makeshift places to continue the task of listing 1,000 new products to the site every day. Employees gathered at the homes of other employees, including Goldberg’s apartment, where the company was originally founded. Fab’s warehouses regained power late Friday, and employees returned to the office this morning.

Goldberg said the cooperation among employees was one of the most touching things he has seen in his career. “On a professional level, nothing — nothing — compares to the actions I saw this week by Fab’s team members who joined together, opened their homes to one another, and who showed courage and leadership and family during a challenging time.”

New York-based Gilt Groupe, which also posts hundreds of new products to their site every day, regained power in its photo studio in Brooklyn on Thursday, and employees pulled double shifts for the last few days to make sure the inventory was ready to be listed on the site. Its corporate office in Manhattan opened today after regaining power over the weekend.

The employees of Lot18, which sells wine online, said they kept the juices flowing by working from each other’s homes. Based on several photos posted to the company’s blog, the big beneficiary of the work-from-home policy seemed to be the employees’ cats and dogs, who were noticeably on or near their humans.

After its headquarters was flooded by the Hudson River, Amazon-owned Diapers.com sent an email to customers on Thursday, apologizing for outages Wednesday that took some Web sites — including Wag.com and Yoyo.com — down for a few hours and warning that shipments may be delayed in areas most affected by the storms.

“A company is only as strong as the people behind it, and we are so grateful to our employees for their unwavering commitment. This past week has been a difficult one for us, as we know it has been for many of you,” wrote the company’s co-founders, Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara, in a letter to customers. “We are headquartered in Jersey City, in a building a few feet from the Hudson River that serves as the place of work for most of our corporate staff and customer care team. The building was flooded by Hurricane Sandy and continues to be inaccessible. For a period of time, we also lost power in one of our warehouses.”

A Diapers spokesperson did not return emails seeking information on the recovery efforts, but according to one customer, it’s business as usual.

“If Diapers.com is hurting, you wouldn’t know. I use them religiously and despite a brief down time on their site (the first I’ve seen since I had my older daughter three years ago) I haven’t noticed a thing,” said Emily Lawi, who is the VP of communications of OpenSky and is returning to work today for the first time since the storm. “I actually ordered from them on Wednesday night and like usual my package arrived midday Friday. I was super impressed.”

If most retailers return to full capacity today, it will be just in time for the holiday shopping season, which starts ramping up this week and continues straight through to Christmas. Others that experienced significant damage to warehouses or inventory won’t be as lucky. At this point, it’s too late to reorder inventory from suppliers around the globe before the holidays. Many economists expect the storm to shave up to half a percentage point from growth in the fourth quarter, according to the New York Times.

But here’s one counterpoint: Fab.com, the quirky online retailer, said today that over the past few weekends, more than 40 percent of the retailer’s sales have come from mobile, and during some periods of the day, more than half of all sales are occurring on a phone or tablet. “I’m betting we’ll see more 50 percent-plus mobile day-parts within the next few months,” wrote Fab’s CEO Jason Goldberg.

In a blog post, the company provided an hour-by-hour breakdown of when traffic from mobile devices was the strongest. The tendencies show that mobile sales are most frequent in the morning and evening, and not surprisingly, that most PC sales occur while people are sitting in front of a computer at work.

Based on current rates, the mobile sales have nearly doubled over the past several months. In March, Fab was seeing roughly 20 percent of its daily sales coming from its mobile apps.

There’s probably at least one major reason for the discrepancy between what the analysts are saying and what Fab is witnessing — that’s scale. It takes a lot more to move the needle of a major retailer that’s already seeing a lot of traffic on its Web site than it does for a site like Fab, which was able to build a lot of organic traffic on mobile from the start. It also probably helped that Fab recently launched new iOS applications, which are more friendly to view on the iPad.

Here’s the hourly breakdown:

Facebook isn’t charging anyone to use its tool set — yet. But you can see obvious ways that Sheryl Sandberg and company could use this stuff to make more money. The fact that they’re calling the feature “Collections” should be enough to signal the e-commerce potential.

And while Facebook says it is merely testing the new tools today, it is rolling them out throughout its U.S. user base this afternoon. This isn’t one of those experiments that Facebook confines to a small subset.

Facebook reps have provided examples of the way the images should appear in your feed, and what will happen if you “Collect,” “Want” or “Like” them — Facebook will test all three verbs. You can see some below, as soon as I can figure out how to use my computer. (Update: Great success!)

Other bare-bones basics they’ve provided about the new tool:

• If they keep it around, it will eventually be available to any company that has a Facebook page.
• You’ll only see the images in your feed if you’re following that company — or if one of your pals interacts with the company’s product.
• Brands can’t turn the photo posts into “sponsored story” ads, for now. But you can certainly imagine that they could.
• Companies can add a link from the photo directly to an e-commerce site. Again, Facebook isn’t charging a referral fee. For now …
• Facebook is starting the experiment with seven retailers, including Pottery Barn, Neiman Marcus, Victoria’s Secret and Fab.com.

The San Jose-based company says its mobile app has been downloaded 100 million times since its launch four years ago. That’s equal to the number of the service’s active users — those who bought, listed or sold something on eBay last year. The company is not saying how many of those downloaded apps are used regularly, but by at least one measure, activity is fairly high — users have now listed 100 million items to its marketplace using the eBay app, by taking a picture of the item with their phone and uploading all the data within minutes.

While many other companies are fretting about how they will make money from mobile, roughly 16 percent of eBay’s revenue this year will be coming from mobile devices. While that’s still a fairly small percentage, that number has doubled in just the past year.

Steve Yankovich, eBay’s VP of mobile, said the average transaction on eBay’s mobile apps runs between $30 and $45, in contrast to companies that sell 99-cent mobile games or virtual goods. On the high end, he notes that more than 9,000 cars are sold every week through the app, some of which are priced above $100,000.

Yankovich says they see the most sales coming from the iPhone out of all the smartphone apps, and a lot of transactions are also coming from the iPad and the mobile Web.

Yankovich calls mobile commerce “situational shopping.” Maybe you’re admiring a friend’s fancy new espresso machine, and you buy it on the spot from your phone, he said. Or you’re on the sidelines at your kid’s soccer game, or stuck on the train, or in a meeting, with some spare time for a bit of shopping. “I could be a consumer just for that moment,” he says.

So far this year, the most expensive item that was listed and sold on eBay via mobile was a $22,500 framed Peter Lik photograph. But if that sounds ridiculous, Yankovich has a plausible explanation: “There’s all kinds of things that are bought on mobile that are six figures. People who have lots of money are also busy,” he said.

EBay previously forecasted that it would hit $10 billion in revenue on mobile this year. Based on last year’s gross merchandise volume of roughly $60 billion, that works out to 16 percent of the company’s revenue. The main app, which gets a five-star rating on the iPhone, is available in eight languages and in more than 180 countries. The company has a separate app for cars and parts, called eBay Motors. It also operates Red Laser, which provides bar-code scanning technology, and an eBay Fashion app, which focuses on clothing. There are versions for a myriad of smartphone operating systems and tablets.

Among private companies that discuss mobile revenue, some are seeing even higher percentages, albeit off a much smaller base. Fab.com, which sells trendy home decor and apparel online, said recently that 30 percent of the company’s revenue and 30 percent of its daily visits are now from mobile. One Kings Lane, which is projecting $200 million in revenue this year, reports that mobile makes up 22 percent of the company’s sales.

A more direct comparison would be to Amazon or Walmart, but neither breaks out mobile revenue, although Amazon does allude to positive metrics, such as selling more e-books than hardbacks and paperbacks combined.

Here’s the eBay infographic with all the fun facts:

The New York-based company, which sells “unique” and trendy apparel, home decor and other items, was part of a wave of commerce sites that experimented with requiring visitors to sign up just to be able to browse its inventory.

In theory, membership provided the facade that the consumer was getting exclusive access to the site, even if it was free and accessible to anyone. It also gave merchants permission to send members a daily newsletter, which helped get new users in the habit of returning to the site everyday.

Today is the first day that visitors to Fab.com will no longer have to register, although customers will have to sign in to buy.

“We have 10,000 products on Fab, and (users) shouldn’t have to log in to discover them,” said Fab’s CEO, Jason Goldberg. “We always felt that design should be for everyone. The exclusive nature of members-only gave us permission to send emails to the inbox, but we are way past that now.”

Because of the required-registration process, some users never made it past the homepage. Goldberg said that about half of the potential customers would be turned away by the requirement, which isn’t a bad conversion rate, “but we decided that a better user experience is better than conversion in the long run.”

That is especially true since about 50 percent of Fab’s referrals are coming from social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. If shoppers can’t easily click through after a friend recommends a product to them, then they could be distracted by the next shiny thing – even if it seemed important at the time to check out the plastic outdoor chairs that double as lanterns, or the ridiculously ironic T-shirts with animal prints that your friends were sharing.

Fab has a sense for what can happen once the restriction is gone. Its mobile application, for instance, has never required users to register to view its inventory. Goldberg said that 30 percent of the company’s revenue and 30 percent of its daily visits are now from mobile.

Other members-only sites, such as Gilt Groupe, have relaxed their requirements over the years. Most of Gilt Groupe’s inventory can be viewed without registering, but some items do require you to log in to see more information. Other sites, like One Kings Lane, have no plans to get rid of the registation process, because they say that it continues to work for them.

Additionally, to fuel the company’s growth, it has plans to hire aggressively, and recently appointed four new high-level executives.

“We want to be the most-visited premium home site in the U.S.,” Mack said, adding that the goal is to rival household names, like Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, West Elm and Restoration Hardware.

The four new hires are VP of Brand Development Sascha Jamall, who most recently ran brand and sourcing at Michaels Arts and Crafts; VP of Legal and General Counsel Susan Stick, who previously held a similar title at Skype; Chief People Officer John K. Anderson, who joins from Quidsi, a subsidiary of Amazon.com; and Chief Product & Technology Officer Jean Sini, who most recently ran engineering at Mint.com.

By the end of the year, Mack said, the San Francisco company could add 30 to 50 employees to bring the total headcount to as many as 350. Most of the new hires will be engineers, he said, adding that Sini has a “blank check” to add as much talent as needed.

One Kings Lane was founded in late 2008 by Susan Feldman and Alison Pincus (wife of Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, the social games company); Mack joined two years ago.

The online retailer sells designer items for the home, ranging from large oriental rugs to sophisticated and modern side tables. Most of the products are sold at deep discounts, and because of limited inventory and scarcity of availability on other sites, some items can sell out in as little as five minutes. If they don’t, they are pulled from the site within 72 hours.

Mack, who is insanely bullish about the company’s prospects, said that even though it is not yet profitable, he doesn’t consider the plans frivolous. Over the past year, One Kings Lane has been able to double top-line revenue, while also managing to cut losses in half.

Still, despite the retailer’s accomplishments, it has remained fairly quiet about its plans, with the exception of announcing several large funding rounds. Last September, the company raised $40 million from Tiger Global Management, Institutional Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Greylock Partners. The round brought total funding to $67 million and valued the firm at $440 million.

Since launching more than three years ago, the company has slowly expanded beyond its roots as a flash sales site.

In 2010, it added “tag sales,” which lets larger-scale interior designers sell off unused items on the site, and this year, it introduced a marketplace, allowing third-party boutiques to sell their unsold inventory on the site — although not all that apply are approved.

To keep up with demand from its five million members, Mack estimates that the site is now listing between 1,000 and 2,000 new products every day, but the goal is not to increase that number too much. Instead, he said, the company wants to stock more of each item to keep from selling out. That way, the site continues to be easy to browse, unlike large retailers that stock millions of items.

Mack said there are two primary ways that One Kings Lane will grow in the future.

The first is by gaining a larger share of home decor purchases, as more shopping shifts online.

He estimates that in 2007 the online home decor market totaled $9 billion, and that by 2015 it will be worth $23 billion. He also anticipates shopping to continue to increase on mobile phones. Already, mobile makes up 22 percent of the company’s sales, and it’s still growing. Other flash sales sites, including Gilt Groupe and Fab.com, are also hoping to benefit from this trend.

The second opportunity is for One Kings Lane to begin designing its own product lines, which is precisely why Mack hired Jamall, the company’s new VP of brand development. As part of Jamall’s responsibilities, he will work with existing suppliers to create one-of-a-kind products for the site. The products could either carry the vendor’s name or the One Kings Lane brand.

At some point, Mack said, an IPO is an option for One Kings Lane, but he isn’t in a hurry — especially as it spends aggressively during this hiring blitz.

“We are enjoying being nimble and operating in the private capital markets,” he quipped.

Flash sale sites try to replicate the frenzy of designer sample sales by offering luxury products and other goods at deep discounts in sessions that can last just hours. When they broke onto the Web a few years ago, start-ups such as Gilt Groupe Inc., Rue La La and HauteLook Inc. were hailed as the next big thing.

But some smaller players have since closed and bigger flash sites have laid off workers. And most of these online retailers have yet to turn a profit, leading some observers to see them as a recession-era phenomenon whose time has passed.

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The acquisition being announced today on the company’s blog is Llustre, a U.K. copycat of Fab that is identically focused on selling home decor, apparel and other items from independent designers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Fab previously purchased Casacanda in Germany and FashionStake in the U.S. to launch a clothing vertical.

Given that Fab has only been around for a year and has seen such significant growth, it appears to have identified just what consumers want: Hard-to-find, quirky and stylish products, gadgets and clothing that are not easily found in Target, Walmart or even on Amazon.com.

The inventory may be shallow, but the product types are vast. Yesterday, the site was selling earphones shaped like bullets, vintage-looking vases, toilet seats that function as bidets and motion-activated cameras for the outdoors. In other words, it’s a hipster’s paradise.

It took Fab four months to hit one million subscribers, six months to hit 1.5 million and 12 months to hit 4.75 million. Fab has not been shy about its successes over the past year, and has raised lots of capital along the way, including a $40 million round in December from Andreessen Horowitz and others.

Now, Fab is claiming it is entering Europe in a serious way, and expects the region to contribute about 20 percent of the New York-based company’s sales this year. Fab is now shipping to 20 countries; it has 360 employees in five offices, including New York, Berlin and London.

Llustre has also moved quickly since launching only two months ago. Founded by Tracy Doree and Vivienne Bearman, it has 25 employees, works with more than 500 designers; membership and orders have tripled in the past five weeks to some unknown quantity.

Starting today, Llustre will become Fab UK. Doree and Bearman will remain on board, heading merchandising and product and operations, respectively.

Pundits and others are using the B word — bubble — more than ever. Is it time to stop, or will this gain even more traction in 2012?

At one point, our conversation turned to the idea of a Social Operating System, something that becomes an underlying platform for all things we do online, that creates continual connectivity between you and and all your friends. As I look back over Facebook’s history and excitedly toward its future, I think we can all say that Facebook has essentially captured that vision. It has presented to us a world where applications run on top of a social infrastructure and where our identities travel throughout our digital experience with us through Facebook Connect. I could not be more impressed.

The way the principles of the social operating system continue to evolve will have a tremendous impact on our society.

First, marketing will change. Friend-to-friend marketing has already shown its strength as the driving force of growth for companies like Gilt Groupe, Uncovet.com and Fab.com, whereby you earn credits with the site by referring your friends to sign up. The idea of shifting traditional marketing spend to continually incentivizing your customers to market on your behalf is changing the way I look at developing systems. The idea, though it sounds simple, has many ramifications. For example, it requires new software to be built with a new set of metrics in order to understand how friend-to-friend marketing is working. It would also lower the cost per acquisition compared to traditional marketing spends.

Second, it’s the influencers who will have most of the power. As we become more and more reliant on our social graph for discovery, the less and less dependent we will become on traditional media. This is one of the principles that drives Twitter, Pinterist and YouTube adoption. We can see how effective is it with companies like ShoeDazzle and BeachMint, which build product lines around celebrities and influencers online. By doing this, they immediately drive higher sales. I theorize these influencer networks will be the next ad networks, having the sway to move audiences to new services and drive sales.

Lastly, these new principles of social software design will prevail. Built on top of platforms like Facebook, they will quickly replace older systems. In the last big wave of acquisitions, we saw media companies and portals buying start-ups to bring innovation inside. I believe the next set of acquirers will be from a wider, more distributed set of buyers — ranging from consumer product brands to financial companies — who are looking for innovators building the next generation of solutions on top of the social operating system. (Looking at the staggering growth rate of the socially-minded site Fab.com quickly reminds us that products built with social grow faster than those without.)

With Facebook’s IPO, the general public will be even more vested in its success and thus help to further boost Facebook’s exponential growth. Facebook’s investors will, in essence, collectively help to drive forward the innovation of social operating system platforms. In addition, any companies that rely on Facebook’s technology or its platform — such as Zynga, Renen and Snap Interactive — should also see a lift in value. This wave of new technology companies will reinvent, once again, the way we live online.

Now that Facebook has gone public, I think we can call the era of Web 2.0 over. The social web is taking its rightful place as the new king.

Michael Jones is the founder and CEO of technology studio Science. The former CEO of Myspace, Jones is a long-time entrepreneur, building and selling numerous successful online and mobile businesses. He is also an individual investor in numerous private start-ups, and, in full disclosure, holds stock in some of the companies listed above.

These are similar to the integrations Facebook did last fall with Yahoo, Rdio, Netflix and other sites for sharing each time a user accesses news stories, music or videos.

Now, developers can choose their own action verbs in addition to “read,” “listen” and “watch.” Some of the ones I heard tonight were “want,” “own,” “nom,” “crave,” “pin,” “pose,” “go” and “see.”

In my view, the new class of apps also includes significantly clearer privacy settings than when the first Open Graph apps launched and users were often unclear about when they were sharing what content with whom.

(See a screenshot above from when I installed the new USATODAY+me app today. If you’re already connected to Facebook through an older version of a participating app, next time you use it, you’ll be asked to re-approve its sharing settings.)

Before and at the launch event, I spoke to a bunch of the partners. Here are the new implementations I found most interesting.

User rewards: Facebook and other sites seem only to take, take, take your data. Fab.com will actually pay users for opting in to share their purchase activity. For the first five months, Fab users who opt into the Facebook social shopping integration will get $10 of credits per month.

Handling purchases: Another interesting thing Fab is doing is automatically hiding when users purchase an item that’s denoted as a gift or that’s an adult product. That may help avoid unhappy or unwanted sharing incidents, like that time back in 2007 when Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon product broadcast a guy’s purchase of an engagement ring on Overstock.com to his Facebook wall.

In fact, another e-commerce partner, Payvment, told me it has decided to avoid sharing when users buy things. Instead, it will focus on less controversial fare like helping users create wish lists and polls.

Mashups: Ticketmaster is doing all the normal stuff you’d expect to help users share with each other when they buy tickets to events. But it’s also the only partner that I saw mashing up multiple Open Graph applications.

If you listen to music on an Open Graph application like Spotify, Ticketmaster automatically detects (with your permission) and tells you when those artists are next playing in your town. Usually these apps depend on which artists you “Like” or explicitly follow. It seems smart to use real, dynamic listening data to figure this out.

Map and graph views: This is a bit of a tease because Facebook hasn’t enabled it yet, but apps like Foodspotting (users upload pictures of food) and Kobo (an e-book reader) told me about some neat visualizations they’d do with aggregate data in users’ Facebook Timelines. For instance, Foodspotting will show on a map all the food you’ve recorded, and Kobo will make pretty charts and timelines of your reading activity.

Right now, apps are mainly allowed to post simple activity records in users’ Timelines, plus they can compile monthly and yearly reports that are basically just pictures with captions. Kinda boring.

Some of the other applications participating in the launch tonight included RockMelt, TripAdvisor, Polyvore, Rotten Tomatoes, Pinterest, LivingSocial and Zynga’s Words With Friends and CastleVille.

Also, starting now, Facebook said it will will approve new Open Graph apps and Actions on a rolling basis.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

In the past seven months, Fab has grown rapidly, registering 1.65 million users, who have purchased 750,000 products.

It now plans to grow even faster, with the help of this acquisition.

Both companies have a similar mission: To bring independent artists and craftsmen, who make aesthetically appealing and sometimes out-of-the ordinary items, to a large marketplace.

Fab.com does this mostly for home decor, and New York-based FashionStake does it mostly for fashion and apparel. The sites have the flavor of a Gilt Groupe, which sells high-end fashion at a discount, except they offer more undiscovered brands, at more reasonable prices.

In a blog post, Fab CEO Jason Goldberg said FashionStake co-founders Vivian Weng and Daniel Gulati will join the Fab company.

Goldberg did not disclose terms of the deal, but it’s possible that he tapped into a large cash reserve, which includes a $40 million round of capital raised last month from Andreessen Horowitz and others.

FashionStake, which launched in September 2010, has received investments from a number of players, including Battery Ventures, Forerunner Ventures and Gilt Groupe co-founder Alexis Maybank.

Last year, FashionStake acquired Moxsie, another retailer of independent fashion.

Today, if you are trying to find the coolest gift from the hottest gift Web site, the experience can be, well, I’ll let iOS developer Ben Jackson, describe it:

Jesus. @Fab is like a river teeming with starving, design-savvy piranhas. It’s like playing Counter Strike to get anything in limited stock.

— Ben Jackson (@benjaminjackson) December 14, 2011

Enter oBaz, which is either just another online curated boutique, or the next stepping stone on the path to wherever online shopping is headed.

What separates oBaz, which stands for “online bazaar,” from competitors like Fab.com is a major attempt at personalization.

Where Fab offers the same aesthete-targeted deals to every visitor, oBaz attempts to offer visitors a mix of products catered to their tastes. In a sense, shoppers don’t look for a store they like, the store fits around whoever “walks in.”

Or, at least, that’s the idea.

“We’ve organized the deals into ‘aisles’ that users can choose to become part of,” said co-founder Brian Ficho. “Once you choose a few aisles, we can start to target deals to you specifically.”

Personalized recommendations in online shopping certainly aren’t new — Amazon has been offering them for years.

But the online retail giant and others are still fundamentally search-and-destroy-style shopping experiences, targeted at shoppers in search of a particular item.

Eight-week-young oBaz is the brainchild of Ficho and Greg Caplan. The company took seed-stage investment from the founders’ former employer, Lightbank, which invested before this recent pivot.

Lightbank is the Chicago-based venture firm founded by Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, the well-known pair who also co-founded Groupon.

Like most very early-stage companies, oBaz still has lots to shake out before it could hit its stride.

The oBaz team, which now numbers six, is experimenting with different ways to build up a “product interest graph,” which will power its product recommendation engine — much like Facebook and LinkedIn are built on graphs of associations between people.

Its current beta product entices users to help build up their graph by playing a “hot or not” game.

In the game, the site shows a picture of a product to which the user can assign a thumbs up or thumbs down. Those preferences are then used to curate the products offered.

But both co-founders acknowledged their current “game” plan is an incomplete solution to the graph-building problem.

Clever customization aside, oBaz will be faced with the same costs of scaling that weigh on Groupon and every other daily deals site that depend on an ever-increasing flow of offers.

But oBaz’s unique model does give them an advantage. Deal sites like Groupon must constantly seek out new companies to source deals from, because many companies can only afford to use Groupon sparingly.

“At oBaz, we aren’t offering that kind of deal. We can maintain a constant relationship with a merchant, who is really using us to sell extra stock of some item,” said Ficho. “We can see how fast a certain deal takes off, then dial it back so that we only sell as many of something as the merchant has in stock — which means we can sell from that merchant all the time.”

If the future of e-commerce is personalization, then oBaz might be among the first to take a very important step for the retail space: Moving past recommendations in a expansive store and instead rebuilding the store for each customer, while filling it with merchandise that really exists.

Caplan and Ficho stopped by the AllThingsD office for a video interview about the infant company: